Day 9 June 3 Thursday

This is how I now walk around Japan. The parasol really is a brilliant idea to keep yourself out of the sun.





Our ryokan, I decided, was the best one yet. It was more like a hotel than anything, with room conditioning and our own shower and toilet. It was cheap, the roomiest yet, and boasted two huge beds which were more like half-kings than twins. It also was floored with tatami mats and had a bath downstairs for ladies, which sadly I never had the chance to use. The only annoying thing about it was that our double room was right above one of the dormitory-style rooms, which one night was full of a rowdy bunch of girls who were up til midnight, their voices echoing through the floor. But I popped in my earplugs and passed out no problem.

First priority today was laundry, but for novelty, we got to hang it out to dry on the roof; from the street we could see our underwear flappin’ in the breeze high overhead. I picked up breakfast from the bakery, a bit of French bread with strawberry jam for me and a mysterious shiny roll for D that turned out to be a savory pork bun. Then we hopped the bus with our special 500Y bus pass, heading south toward the major temple district.

Bad fortunes. At all the temples you can pay for a slip of paper with your fortune. You keep good fortunes, but when you draw a bad fortune, you tie it around a tree and the tree diffuses the fortune for you. Poor tree!





The first temple we entered would be our favorite stop of the trip. Shoren-in was empty except for us and maybe twenty other visitors during the hour we were there. We took our time walking through the huge bamboo house, artistically arranged so that from each window or balcony, you could gaze straight through two or three other windows or doors that framed a perfectly pruned tree or the huge stones that made a bridge in the pond. The rooms, open to the air, were lined with painted panels and the tatami mats and wooden floors creaked and sloped. Darkened, cracking painted figures stared at us from five hundred year old eyes. The thunder that had been threatening us all morning was loud, and as the rain started to fall, we sat quietly and watched rain fall onto the pond, spattering the dust of the path into dark spots which lightened again almost instantly as the water soaked through.

Darryl doing what he does.



We sat quietly, and so did the rest of the Japanese visitors. Then a European family walked by on the verandah. Their little boy, maybe 4 years old, had been running back and forth without them. We had seen him in rooms by himself as we walked around. Now, we watched in horror as he ran up to a wood panel dating from the Heian period and snapped off an eight-inch slat. We stared as the mother, not knowing she was being observed, picked up the piece, tried to fit it back into place and, when it wouldn’t go, tossed it into the pond. They hurried away, their boy still running around aimlessly, scampering through rooms without them. D took a photo of the piece and the damage and we followed the long, mazelike walk back to the entrance. In D’s limited Japanese he managed to tell the lady at the desk that the “little noisy foreign child” did this. She gasped and gestured at us to wait. We heard her feet pattering as she literally ran from the room. A moment later she was back with a young monk with a shaved head. D went through his story again and the monk nodded gravely, thought hard, and then said to us, “This—very old.” It was heartbreaking but there was nothing else we could do. He thanked us, and as we left, we saw that he was trying to get the attention of a much older monk who seemed to be showing a distinguished guest through the gardens.



We climbed the steps of a few more shrines, but with the feeling that we had just capped our visit, until we reached the big pagoda that marked the edge of the district. Turning back, we ducked into a cafe just as the rain began again. D had a stack of green tea-flavored and soybean-flavored ice cream—may I say, yuck—and I had a bit of coffee rollcake and a hot chocolate that I would swear was made with nothing but cream and cocoa powder, as I had to add my own sugar.



When the rain stopped, we headed home, cleaned up, took in the laundry from the roof which was already hot in the sun, and managed to call and arrange for a hotel in Osaka with minimum drama. For dinner, we returned to Gion. This time we ended up at an okonomiyaki restaurant, cooking the okonomiyaki ourselves on a hot plate at our table—a sort of eggy pancake thing, very filling, if not the most satisfying.